Imagine if You Woke up
by Uazula
Summary: A story inspired by a post on Tumblr. A boy with a bizarre condition holds the key to unraveling a hunt which has the Winchesters stumped and lead-less.


I woke up facing the window.

The curtains were drawn, but as grand as my deposit of luck was, that little sliver of light from where my body tugged on the fabric and revealed the glass was directly on my eyes.

It hurt to look, but I stared at the light. I lied there and let my eyes burn as they adjusted. I looked at the chilly view of old cars and a weather-worn fence, chain link and wood. The ground looked like frozen chunks of clumpy grass and dirt. A bird momentarily landed, and when the chill got to its feet, it puffed its chest and fluttered its wings, taking off into the air where I couldn't turn my head to watch.

I noticed my backside was warmer than my front. As I slowly stretched my sleep-worn muscles, I felt the familiar frozen sensation in my feet and toes that seemed ever present. My pillow-less head met no comforted relief on the springy mattress, and I let out a quiet, huffed sigh as I realized that my sleep had, once again, given me no additions to my energy reserves.

My frigid and bare toes tugged at the tucked in sheet as I used my right elbow to prop myself up. I used my left hand to plaster my damp hair from my forehead. As my hand dropped, I closed my eyes.

_No scent, except for the chill. No one's gotten breakfast started. Shuffling feet in the other room. Typing. Sam's here. Fridge opening and a gentle clink of bottles. Dean's grabbing a beer. _

_Nearby sigh, gruff and resigned. I can hear him scratching his chin. He's stumped. Bobby's researching. Which means Sam's researching. Which means Dean is waiting impatiently for them to find the information._

_They're still on this thing._

I sat up straight and grit my teeth as my spine seemingly popped at every vertebrae. My left hand grabbed my chest wrappings which extended to my belly. I sucked in a cold breath, paused, and then opened my eyes.

Bobby was over by the far shelf, adding book after book to his growing pile of dusty, leather-bound Latin scribbles that perched precariously on his desk. He scratched the back of his head absentmindedly through his cap, then grabbed another tome and opened it to a marked page. I watched for a minute as he stood there and listened to him quietly whisper the words he was reading.

Finally, I swung my legs out from under the sheets with a surge of energy that I shouldn't have possessed at that hour. I let my toes gently touch the floor, where their numbness met a buzz of stimulus from the scuffed wood.

_Fuck. I slept in my jeans again._

I should've been used to sleeping in my dirty clothes, but I was especially miffed when I felt my pants buttons tearing and tugging away at my clammy, damp skin with the change of orientation. They were filthy, covered in grime and blood and God knows what else.

When I stood, and the floor creaked, Bobby turned his head to eye me for a second, before he turned back to his novel.

"Welcome to the world, sleeping beauty. Hope I didn't wake you."

I stared at his backside, formulating. His sass wasn't entirely unexpected. As I practiced straightening my back, I remarked, "Well you clearly missed your beauty sleep, old man."

"Don't need to sleep the way I look, boy." He exaggerated that term of endearment. It was an all too subtle reminder of Bobby's characterization of my character. The newbie. The underling. The suspicious kid with the fucked up past the even more fucked up future.

I let it remain as his victory. I pulled a deep, long breath in and trudged towards the kitchen, scratching my junk and yawning way too loudly to be considered a normal utterance. I entered the kitchen with a picture of how Sam and Dean were going to be positioned. I was too close for comfort.

There was Sam, sitting in the kitchen with his knees way apart under the table. His eyes were squinted and blinking and his fingers were twitching rapidly on the keyboard.

There was Dean, leaning against the shuttered window behind him. Unsurprisingly, he had a beer to his lips. His eyes flickered to me as I entered and he lowered his beer. He nodded at me with a chin jut. I returned the gesture with a passive wave of my hand and another yawn, stumbling towards the refrigerator. I opened the door with aggressive tug at the old machine's hinges and stood there in front of it, staring at it and feeling its cold build in strength on my senses.

As expected, beer. And a couple of jars of suspicious looking shit. I reached in and grabbed a beer, wincing at how cold it felt on my palm. I turned and walked towards Dean, stopping a few feet away from him to remove the top and take a sip. I looked up at Dean, who was also ingesting. As soon as we had both swallowed, and the silence had become overbearing and irritating, I jerkily gestured toward Sam with my left hand and said, "So, what have you guys got?"

Dean looked at me, and then at Sam, who remained silent and ever-typing. When he looked back at me I adjusted myself so I was square on with him. He crossed his legs and leaned back.

"To be honest, I don't even know anymore." Dean said quickly, taking another sip. "We've been on this for a month. And we've found jack. I mean, the omens are freakin' everywhere," He gestured with his left to encompass what he deemed to be "everywhere". "… and they don't have a pattern, and everywhere we've tried is a dead end. "

"Where else do you have to try, then?" I said, stepping over to Sam and leaning on the table with my right and placing the beer down with my left.

As if coming out of a reverie, Sam blinked and looked at me quickly before leaning back in his chair and rubbing his face. "Hell man, Dean's right. There isn't a pattern. They're random assaults, and what's worse is they seem to be getting gorier as they go along."

I stared at the computer screen. Sam had about eight tabs going. One was a storm watch, one looked like some sort of Latin translating shit, and the one he had open was related to Biblical Revelation predictions. The picture of Christ it had on the first page was a happy looking Jesus. His eyes kind of looked sad, like he was trying not to sob hysterically thinking of how humanity was going to head into a steep slope straight to hell.

Before I could start reading what was actually on the page, I started to sink into a kind of fuzzy, just-woke-up-weary sensation. When it started to gain precedence over my senses, however, I realized that I was probably heading into another fit. It was the same one I got when I opened my eyes after I regained consciousness and was found bloody and broken in a warehouse in Omaha. My vision got blurry and the picture of Christ on the computer screen seemed to bob and sway, one minute looking peaceable, the next with the devil's smile on his lips. His eyes looked black, as though a demon had claimed him.

"You'd think Jesus would have an anti-demon possession tattoo." I joked to myself. It had been my intention to inwardly express that lame-ass joke, but in my slowly spiraling hallucinogenic state, it spewed out my mouth as though I was drunk. I'm sure the two of them gave me weird looks, but all I could see from my slowly receding field of vision was Sam staring at me confusedly, with that "puppy-dog look", as Dean liked to call it. I squeezed my eyes tight and shook my head, letting another sound, much like an orgasmic groan, slip through my lips. These little pieces of a story started flooding into my head, making it pound and creating a hissing sound in my ears.

_No, not a story. A dream. _The_ dream. That same fucking dream again. Did something new happen?_

I erect my back and shook my head again. Both Sam and Dean were staring, like I had started to sprout wings and grow a beak. I smiled at them with a great deal of strain and waived my hand in reassurance, then stooped over and tried to stop my heaving breathing from popping my lungs.

_Yeah… something new did happen. _I grunted and smirked to no one in particular._ What now, blogger? Did you analyze some more Reichenbach Falls scenarios? Did you manage some more Johnlock while you were at it? How about Merlin, how have you been holding up?_

"Hey, you alright? You're not having another episode, are you?" Dean said. His voice matched his image, fuzzy and blurry and spinning in circles around my field of vision.

I stumbled back and cried out when my hip was stabled by the desk in the corner. "Shit! No. No I 'm good. I just need to sit for a sec."

"Is he havin' another dizzy spell?" Bobby yelled from the other room. He sounded unimpressed and frankly, he sounded like he didn't give a crap one way or the other.

"Yeah…" Dean muttered. Or maybe he yelled. I couldn't tell at that point. He did move closer, though. Sam was watching from the table; I could see his eyes fixed on me. Those dark little pinpricks were the only thing in the room that didn't move. Black as coal, like Jesus' demon had slipped into Sam. "C'comme, go sit," Dean suddenly said, his voice right next to my ear. My head pounded in response.

He dragged me somewhere. When I felt the mattress, I knew he had set me back on that makeshift bed, but other than that, everything was swirling and pulsating and was tinged in this sick greyish-yellow that made the world look as though someone had vomited all over it. I was assaulted with some more images of scenes and people that I didn't know. That same life of that same girl from that same dream.

_Stabbing. Stabbing. I'm being stabbed. Shit, shit! Dean, fuck, do something! _

The world was dark as sin, and I couldn't tell if I was sitting up straight or lying down flat. Maybe I was descending to hell. Either way, pain was a new addition to my convulsions. And it hurt like hell. I grabbed at my chest. _Who's stabbing me?_ The wrapping around my chest seemed to squeeze my ribcage and deflate my lungs.

"Guys, guys! He's tearing himself apa-… God dammit, help me hold him down!" When he grabbed my arms, it burned like fire.

"What the fuck…!" Sam's hands on my ankles felt like blistering ice.

"Get rope or something!" Bobby called out.

_What the fuck happened in that last dream? _

Sam shouted as my mind went somewhere where my body couldn't follow. "Dean! Dean, you've got to call Cas!"


End file.
